Search results

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee has canceled Thanksgiving as part of a new COVID lockdown. The Grinch of Whoville couldn't have created a better policy.

We've just gotten a whole bunch of good news – news we really needed – about finally getting the upper hand against COVID-19. Two vaccines, both more than 90% effective at protecting clinical trial participants against the disease, were announced just seven days apart. These numbers are well beyond expectations, but some critically important questions linger. Here they are. The answers will determine how successful the vaccines will be.

Medscape is a website focused on those working in healthcare. They recently ran a survey on some ethical dilemmas facing physicians.

Almost 100 years ago, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel about a doctor trying to elevate scientific discovery over the pursuit of wealth that often accompanies the practice of medicine.
The story was about young Dr. Martin Arrowsmith, who discovers a new treatment for bubonic plague. It appears the drug works – but without rigorous controlled experiments, who can be sure?  Arrowsmith wants to play by the scientific rules and hold off universal dispensation until he can "prove" the efficacy of the treatment using controlled studies -- all the while people are dying around him.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have tried several means to reduce healthcare spending, notably bundling services for procedural care and the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) for primary care. A new study looks at cost savings in the primary care model.

COVID-19 has brought supply chains more prominently into our lives. Those include getting toilet paper onto store shelves, assuring take-out food gets delivered, as well as deliveries being made during the Christmas season. And the first COVID-19 wave revealed our Strategic National Stockpile cupboards were mostly bare. (Spoiler Alert: The "why" has far more to do with logistics than political affiliation.)

A writing partnership, between a University of Maryland professor and the pharmaceutical expert at the American Council on Science and Health, continues to thrive, producing valuable health information for publication in a major national newspaper.

Kelsey Grammer is poised, quick witted, has a good sense of humor, and carries an aura of intellectual authority. He should be the next Jeopardy! host.

Since 1986, the federal government has tracked vaccines' adverse effects through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. It's a post-approval mechanism that captures any adverse event reported to it.

In a recent interview, Andrew Kolodny maintained that pain patients don't hate him. Some would disagree. What would it look like if they sang their displeasure rather than voiced it? With apologies to Leonard Bernstein.

Voting by mail is at least 200 years old in America, catching up on powerful women in our past, are we going the way of Ancient Rome, and how can we identify the trustworthy.

A study by a group from the Mayo Clinic in Arizona focuses on making it easier to dispose of unused opioid pills. I would argue that we need better disposal methods for opioids like a fulminating case of crabs. Here are both sides of the debate.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would rather allow more Americans to become infected with and die from coronavirus than to allow an imperfect vaccine distribution plan to proceed.

As the search for a COVID-19 vaccine continues, we also continue to ponder who will be in the front of the queue. If we wish to restore our economy, we must undoubtedly consider vaccinating essential workers early on. But who exactly are they?

Pfizer's vaccine is based on RNA, which is a very unstable molecule that is prone to breaking down. Storing it at -94° F prevents this, but it creates the logistical difficulty of transporting the vaccine.

By any measure, today's announcement about the unexpected efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine is great news. But, Pfizer's Dr. Robert Popovian cautions us that the job is not done. There are policies that are essential to ensure the vaccine is promoted to the public, distributed, and administered properly. And be priced so that everyone can get it. Devil. Details.

There's nothing like fear to generate abnormal behavior. And in the age of COVID-19 there's plenty of fear going around (so expect a lot of it). In the past few months, we've seen that one of these odd behaviors is attributed to a significant number of health-news headlines recommending vitamin C to purportedly assist one's immune response to COVID-19. Let's take a closer look.

Every year Livermore National Laboratory produces a chart of where our energy comes from and where it goes. The biggest changes, less coal, more natural gas. 

To reduce payments to doctors by device manufacturers and pharma companies, the federal government instituted a regulatory policy, the Sunshine Act, in 2013. The goal was to allow the disinfecting nature of transparency to reduce the ethical problem of obligation when receiving "gifts." Two reports update how that battle seems to be going.

Be honest. Few of us actually read nutritional labels. That said, marketing specialists have studied which labels may make a difference, and to whom. Can we use their findings to help us make other choices?

Operation Warp Speed brought together a broad array of government resources to achieve a similar, seemingly impossible rapid pace of development, regulatory approval, and distribution of vaccines to prevent COVID-19. But no matter how quickly or successfully vaccine(s) are developed we have been woefully ineffective in the development of other ways to tame the pandemic, especially readily available and accurate tests and proper PPE. Will the Biden plan pick up the slack?

There’s a new diet that’s the talk of the town. It advocates eating more calories, not less. So is it all fad, or is there a grain of truth to it?

I've been writing about the barbaric war against pain patients since 2013. Despite the hundreds of desperate emails I've received, and the stories I've read, it has never entirely hit home. Until now. My very elderly mom is being put through the wringer, in order to get some tramadol for back pain. If this doesn't demonstrate the colossal stupidity of our drug laws, nothing does.

There are three major reasons why SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, will never be eradicated.

Should people who were given propofol be allowed to drive home? Are men drivers better or worse than women? Some ghastly chemistry poetry, and one of the funniest YouTube videos ever. Oh, to answer the original question: it's impossible to tell from this study. Here's why.